Nobel prizewinner Brian Josephson did an interview with New Scientist recently that was really quite interesting. Many people know that he won a Nobel Prize for his work in superconductivity as a 22 year old. What many of those same people don't know is that he's been an ardent supporter of the paranormal as simply unexplained phenomenon by science as well. Here's a couple of quotes from the interview:

You have become an advocate for unconventional ideas. How did that happen?

I went to a conference where the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste was talking for the first time about his discovery that water has a "memory" of compounds that were once dissolved in it - which might explain how homeopathy works. His findings provoked irrationally strong reactions from scientists and I was struck by how badly he was treated. To an extent, I realised that the way science is done by consensus could get things completely wrong. I feel that it's important to try and correct the errors that scientists are making.
What errors are these?

I call it "pathological disbelief". The statement "even if it were true I wouldn't believe it" seems to sum up this attitude. People have this idea that when something can't be reproduced every time, it isn't a real phenomenon. It is like a religious creed where you have to conform to the "correct" position. This leads to editors blocking the publication of important papers in academic journals. Even the physics preprint archive blocks some papers on certain topics, or by certain authors.

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You draw the line in a very different place to most scientists when it comes to hard-to-prove phenomena such as telepathy and cold fusion.

Can I take you up on something? These things are not hard to prove, they're just hard to get accepted. The evidence for these phenomena would normally lead to them being accepted, but they have an additional barrier in that they are "unacceptable" and often unpublishable. Some people are extraordinarily hard to convince. In particular, people who work in an area in which the phenomena are highly reproducible cannot envisage situations such as cold fusion where - as in many areas of materials science - things are not that reproducible. They take the illegitimate step from "hard to reproduce" to "non-existent". Science is often presented as an objective pursuit, but the history of science tells you that this is far from being the case.

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I take it that means you pay a price for speaking out about things like cold fusion, telepathy and the paranormal.

Yes. If you say you accept the reality of the paranormal then this automatically affects your reputation. It's assumed that if a person believes in this kind of thing then his views are not worth considering. It has led to certain people being very prejudiced against me and assuming that there's something wrong with anything I do. I don't have the kind of support network that researchers usually have. But since I can do my research on the mathematics of the brain by myself this is less of a problem than it otherwise would be, though it slows down progress considerably.

Why do you speak out about these things when you know it causes difficulties for your own research career?

They are important for various reasons. For example, cold fusion may contribute significantly to solving the problem of generating clean energy. Had it not been ridiculed back in 1989, we'd probably all now be using energy generated by cold fusion. So it's really important to speed up the process. I reckon that cold fusion will be accepted in the next year or so.

I've heard him talk on the subject of the paranormal before, and I think he manages to sum up many of my beliefs very succinctly. While it's true that quite a few people in the mainstream of science are unable to accept many phenomena as "possible", it's also just as true that many scientists actually enjoy exploring the boundaries. I think these are the scientists that generally get ignored when people begin bashing science.

As another Nobel prizewinner, Percy Williams Bridgman, once famously said, "There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea."